PERCEPTION AND SENSATION
By Artists Anonymous
The English title of this exhibition may strangely oscillate in the minds of Germanspeaking audiences, as the GERMAN words “Sensation” (known only in the
meaning associated in English with the word “sensational”) and “Perzeption”
(meaning “understanding”, “view of a matter”) differ somewhat from their
ENGLISH counterparts. But it’s a game of words and meanings that accurately reflects the interplay between the staged set-up and “reality” in the installation by
Artists Anonymous at Magazin4. It’s a place where one may question one’s perceptions, experiencing sensations of a sensual sensibility, but knowing that there
is no such thing as an objective reception, and that one can, ultimately, never
hope to have a “correct” conception of anything.
“In different people the individual perception of colours that may (objectively) bear the
same names can be quite divergent. These individual variations can go as far as the
partial or even complete breakdown of the receptors in the eye, resulting in a colour vision deficiency.”
The various languages of the world possess a great many words to describe the nuances of different colours. And often certain names for colours are missing in a particular
language, while they may exist in another – compare, for example, the relatively late appearance of the words for “orange” and “magenta”in the German language. Similarly,
too, the meanings of the words used for colours are themselves subject to social
change. In the German language the word “brown”, during the 17th century, seemed to
refer more to a hue between “dark blue” and “darkly violet”. In a German church hymn of
the time we find the curious colour description: “As the sun is going down, night time enters oh so brown.”
First row, oil on canvas, negative
Second row, after-images, c-prints, positive
An after-image is any one of a number of phantom pictures that your eye will continue
to perceive after you have gazed on a bright surface. Negative after-images come about
through a “fatigue” of the photoreceptors of the retina at the back of the eye, called the
rods and cones. If these are exposed for 30 or more seconds to the same stimulus, their
potential, viz. their chemical properties are exhausted and they go temporarily “blind”
and no longer relay any signals to the brain.
….analysed the information processing inside the brain – with the central statement that
from the interaction between the sensory organs (e.g., the eyes) and the brain no reliable replication of the outer world could be expected, and that there would always be a
good deal of interpretation involved where the brain would unscramble the incoming sig-
nals so that what we perceive as “ reality” is, first and foremost, a subjective
re/construction…
…the after-image, then, reflects the object the way it was imprinted on the retina, which
need not necessarily coincide with the picture we have of that object….
In contrast to the additive mixing of light colours the subtractive mixing deals with transparent or reflecting body colours or paints. These are the ones that are used in painting.
The additive mixing of colours is an optical model that describes the mixing behaviour
of light colours. The creation of photographic after-images allowes the additive mixing.
Perception, sensitivity to stimuli -- generally describes the process of a more or less
conscious intake of information by a living creature, via its sensory organs. Also, the data taken on board and processed is occasionally referred to as perceptions or even percepts.
The ability to have sensory stimulus recognition (perception) can even be consciously
heightened by an increase in attention. Perceptions are primarily unconscious processes
of an individual’s information gathering and cognitive domains, which in the consciousness of the information recipient cause so-called pictures to arise in the head (called images) of perceived partial aspects of reality.
The process of perception ensures that the information data coming in from the outside
is structured in, and sorted into, the recognition system of the information recipient in a
specific way. Perceptions, then, are selectively subjective inventories of the exterior
world surrounding the individual. They are relatively static.
Perception does not only refer to the purely subjective result of the perception process
(or percept) -- it also describes the neurophysiological processes (sensory perceptions)
that underlie them.
One ought not, under the concept of perception as defined above, subsume merely processes comprehension, recognition and evaluation, in otherwords, the mental digestion
of what one has perceived, which, in the days of a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz or Immanuel Kant or Wilhelm Wundt, tended to be referred to as “apperception” and would today,
in a more stringent sense, be called “cognition”. Apperception requires an almost wilful
or volitional direction of one’s attention, whereas perception in the widest sense also
comprises subconscious and emotional feelings and sensory perceptions.
The word sensation (adjective: sensational; taken from the French “sensation”, a sensory impression; Latin “sensus”, feeling, understanding, and “sentire”, to sense, feel,
perceive with one’s senses) refers to a conspicuous, attention grabing or extraordinary
event. This event becomes a sensation only after being communicated, i.e., by being
picked up and rapidly distributed along the various channels of communication.